march; or, taking a moment to feel good about satan

In the past four months, my dear, old friend Beth has given me an antique slip, a vacuum cleaner, a set of measuring spoons, a dresser, a table, a silk nightie, a black and white photograph of a happy nun, a pair of reading glasses, and a large, hollow, wooden bunny that I could potentially secret things away in.  Oh, and a place to live.  She and her mom have fed me dinners, poured whole bottles of wine into my cup, listened to my tirades, and told me to get real when my whining verged on indulgent self-pity.  I’ve gotten very sweet hugs and kisses and also reminders that I’m not the only one in the world whose dreams have frayed away.  It’s more comfortable to be the one in a relationship who gives rather than the one who receives—there’s real power in helping and giving to others—but in the past couple years I’ve grown humble and accepted much help from my friends. 

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a [hu]man can have no other vocation than to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him...

I was surprised to hear this quotation from Albert Camus.  Camus, author of The Plague and The Stranger, a book about a man who murders someone for seemingly no reason at all.  It’s been over twenty years since I read these books, and when I sought them out, it was because I thought they were edgy and dangerous.  In the 80’s, downtown Northampton, MA was pimpled with morose-looking teenagers wearing black clothes and smoking cher bidi cigarettes (this was before, even, Morrisey sang the line, “I wear black on the outside because black is how I fe-e-el on the inside”), and one afternoon I ran into one of these, my friend André, who told me, “I’ve been really depressed lately.  I’ve been reading a lot of existential literature.”  For some reason, this encounter left the impression that reading as much existential literature as quickly as possible was a high priority, and with my earnings from Roz’s Place (the awesome vintage clothing store where I worked, played cards, and learned to sew), I acquired The Stranger, The Plague, No Exit, Nausea, The Age of Reason, The Chips Are Down, The Reprieve, Notes From the Underground, and The Mandarins.  I read them as fast as I could, really only enjoying The Age of Reason by Sartre and The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir.  I also read much of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and a little of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, finding much of interest in the former and little of interest in the latter.  Truly, I have since had opportunity to realize in many different contexts that nothingness does not interest me as much as it does some others.  Everythingness, on the other hand, is constantly intriguing and distracting on a moment-by-moment basis.

Where was I?  Oh, yes!  So, when I did all this reading in Existentialism, I wasn’t necessarily in a reflective state of mind so much as an acquisitive one—I needed to acquire knowledge and quickly because my own ignorance was embarrassing and, I felt, a barrier to the kind of profound emotional experience André was having that afternoon on the steps of City Hall.  Teachers did little to alter my attitude toward knowledge from acquisitive to reflective, and their disdain for my frequent confusion and misprision was often palpable.  My uninformed impression of Camus as philosophically cold and inhumanly cruel lingered for decades because I uncritically identified him with the protagonist of The Stranger.  A sound-byte understanding of existentialist philosophy—life is meaningless, god is dead, and all experience is absurd—remained unchallenged and mostly unaltered as everythingness swooped down upon me and swept me off to other compass-points.  It’s only now that I read this one quotation from Camus’ letters, it suddenly seems obvious that what Camus tries to demonstrate in his work is that in a world devoid of divinely granted direction, the very best morality we can embrace is in refining our relationships with one another.  We can succumb to the void, or we can work to create meaning within ourselves and amongst one another.  Why are Beth and I friends?  Because we decided to be twenty-five years ago—enjoying each other and finding much to talk about—and have tried to help and be kind to each other since then.  Love is a feeling, but more importantly it’s something you do, a performance, an action. 

I am challenged every day by the insane difficulty of being good to people around me.  I bitch at people constantly from behind the wheel of my car, and I daydream about thumping certain restaurant customers on the forehead with a dirty soup-spoon.  Often it’s not much easier to be generous, kind, or helpful to my nears and dears, the people I actually know and care about.  And yet I fundamentally agree with Camus’ statement above and can’t think of a better raison d’être than to feel and bestow happiness.  Happiness is an underrated achievement, I think—not happiness because you’re successful or rich or married to a toothsome human specimen, but freestanding, independent happiness.  There’s joy in being alive, in seeing what there is to see and knowing what there is to know.  Maybe I’m blessed with good biochemistry (this is no doubt true), but I feel as though the mystery of existence is woven through with bright threads of happiness in both its warp and its woof.  It’s the philosophy of some that to live is to suffer, and I’m not sure who could argue that, but what unfortunate soul amongst us wouldn’t agree that to live is also to feel joy?  Under a microscope, our cells look like they are singing and dancing.  On a cellular level, we are just screaming with the great good fortune of being alive. Cellula in Latin means “little room,” and in all those little rooms there are a bunch of kick-ass parties going on.  For some reason, we didn’t remain single-celled critters trying to make the most out of life in a gigantic pot of organic soup, but through some impulse we might relate to, our cells symbiotically collected together in ever increasing complex ways until we each became the mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a riddle that puts on clean underwear most days and heads out into the world to do stuff that seems to need doing.  (I think I might be the next evolutionary step—the mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a riddle and smothered with a rich dollop of puzzlement.)  So billions of years ago, our cells discovered this trick of symbiosis, an achievement any prime time television show is ample evidence that we as more sophisticated organisms haven’t yet attained in any abiding way.  Not for lack of trying!  We have the will, it seems, to live out our lives happily amongst others, but we don’t understand how.

I should apologize for my simplistic treatment of cellular biology.  Most of what I know on the subject I learned from Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book A Wind in the Door, which I read, um, twenty-nine years ago.  Apart from that, the only other relevant factoid to make an impression on me is the one theoretical quantum physicists, new-age spiritualists, and Moby like to repeat, that our cells are partly comprised of matter from stars that burned brightly in distant galaxies gazillions of years ago.  “He whose face gives no light will never become a star,” William Blake says in his “Proverbs of Hell,” and the ancients tell stories of human worthies who are rewarded by being made into stars or whole constellations—they almost had it right.  Instead of us becoming stars, stars become us.  We are their ghosts.  And they’re our distant ancestors.  A good graphic artist could do a lot with that concept.  Red giants in top hats and waxed moustachios . . . white dwarves in bows and pinafores.  Or maybe Blake was on to something after all, and after long-dead stars fill our cells with stardust, and we spend our lives walking and talking and whatnot, and we die and decompose, some of the dust we crumble into floats off again beyond our cerulean atmosphere and back into space.  A hugely slow life cycle.  I can think of worse afterlives than to be cosmic dust, the ground of being for dancing angels who spiral through space singing sanctus, sanctus, sanctus, star songs, the music of the spheres...

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!

The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand

and asshole holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is

holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an

angel!

So howls Ginsberg (God, what a poem!).  Why do the ancients imagine the universe as full of music?  Music requires order, rhythm, cadence—the harmonia mundi, they called it, dreaming up a world beyond our sight in harmony, whatever the chaos that might afflict our days and souls and skins.  Is space silent, cold, and empty, as scientists say, or is it an overheated dancehall where the pillars of creation keep the beat for the raving bodies of seraphim, throwing down new stars that dance themselves to pieces, eager for their destiny as motes minutely lodged in our being, keeping us together, propping us up?  (awesome discotheque.)  They come apart and in the blink of a god’s eye, we come together.  Shit, man!  We need to be doing a whole lot more singing and dancing.  (I recommend the Basement on Saturday nights.  Danny and Ariel took me there a couple months ago and they were spinning such great R & B and old rock-and-roll, I completely danced my face off, which is what happened to my face for those of you wondering...)

While I’m on the subject of stars, I know I mentioned that my boyfriend Nick has silver eyes, but did I mention that they’re the exact color of starlight?  Or actually, to be even more specific, they’re the color of starlight glinting off a fairy’s wing.  I think this stuff up on those nights he’s at his own apartment, and I’m lying in my cellula, my tiny bedroom, looking out my window at the snowy river next to my house.  I feel so lucky that even though I live in a city, there’s nothing but trees and a river outside my bedroom window, even if the view is crisscrossed with thick electrical wires (as Iñarritu’s new movie Biutiful suggests in its title, I think, the world is both beautiful and it’s not—both simultaneously and contrarily and harmoniously all together).  My apartment, the first home that’s all mine, is both beautiful and it’s not.  The wood floors are rather worn, the ceilings are dropped, and it smells faintly of cat pee.  This was never a house built for luxurious living.  On the other hand, it’s full of lovely details, a home more desirable than that of most of the world’s population and of most of those who ever lived.  I can’t take that for granted.  We talk about our neanderthal ancestors who lived in caves—newsflash!  People still live in caves.  And not just in developing countries.  I guarantee that people live in caves in Massachusetts, people lacking in money or sanity or, maybe, social skills satisfactory to the status quo.  My old friend David lived in a cave at the edge of Golden Gate Park overlooking the Pacific Ocean for months and months during a particularly insolvent period of his life.  If it turns out that I can’t pay my rent every month, I might look into cave-dwelling myself.  But for the moment, I take grand pleasure in shoving seven-hundred dollars cash in an envelope with my landlord’s name on it every month.  Writing monthly checks to the electric company, the gas company, SallieMae, and Capital One gives me tidal surges of pride.  Right now, I have a home for my inherited, antique furniture, my senile, elderly cats, and myself.  There’s a roof above my dreams and secure walls around my fragile, naked hours.  I’ve painted the insides of these walls yellow, green, cream, blue, scarlet, teal, and two shades of orange—arguably too much color for a four-room apartment.  I have a library with two desks, a futon, a chaise lounge, and hundreds and hundreds of books.  True, according to Feng Shui, the river flowing by is going in the wrong direction, symbolically carrying money away from my front door, but there is at least a mountain behind my house, one covered in mists that move around it, graceful as wraiths, as I wait for tea-water to boil and bread to toast in the morning.  A mountain at your back is always good, but a mountain full of ghosts inestimably better.  You can turn your back on ghosts—they don’t mind—but it’s a cold thing to turn your back on the living.  These past couple years have brought out the worst in me—my pettiness, my tweaky anxiety, my narcissism—but those who matter to me and to whom I matter haven’t turned away.  Do I know the best people in the world, or is this just how people are—caring, sweet, and generous?  It’s hard to believe, looking at the news, that people are even remotely decent, but everyone I know seems the mold and model of some superhuman virtue.

If happiness is the supreme end in life, as right now I believe it to be, then my friends—Beverly, Beth, Neilsen, Nanci, Shoes, Joshie, and my brother spring to mind—are sage gurus.  They show me the way.

One of the things that made me an effective teacher, I think, is that my students felt aware of how completely happy I felt to be in their presence, to be in the classroom with them.  Except for a few miserable, substance-addled years as an adolescent, school was always my particular seventh heaven, the empyrean realm within which all things might flame into possibility.  Through education, I became intellectually a walker between worlds, a time-traveler, a shape-shifter, simultaneously restless and content, hungry and replete.  I never felt overly smart, but I was enthralled with the adventure of wondering, inquiring, searching, debating, analyzing, reading, pondering, reconfiguring, awaiting my small revelations and positing my small critiques.  In the classes I taught, my knowledge was the least of what I had to offer my students; the best I could offer them was myself, my whole self, and the adventure of my life, conducted largely on an intellectual scale.  I loved my students from the moment I set eyes on them, from the moment I saw their names on the roster, actually, and wanted to know each of them personally.  For me, it was hard to be their teacher unless I was also their friend; they brought out the best in me.  The biggest point I wanted to make to them about medieval and Renaissance literature was that it was fun, that dipping into other historical realities and cultural perspectives broadens us in a way that just feels good, not unlike the way a big stretch in the morning feels good.  We learn more about our lives, our relationships, our problems, potential and limitations through reflecting on those of Gawain, Alysoun of Bath, Hamlet, and Faustus.  I wanted for my students to know themselves better, to know what strengths and special gifts they bring to the adventure of life, and to know more about what that adventure can consist of.

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a [hu]man can have no other vocation than to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him...

I glean how unprofessional, how unsophisticated all this sounds to established academia, and I could dress up these sentiments in academese, their own language, if I wanted to, but I’m not talking to them, I’m talking to you, the angelic Everyman.  You’re the ones I want to talk to, have always wanted to talk to, and I thought that in being in the classroom with you I had found my raison d’être, my vocation.  Here’s a picture I’ll always treasure...

Ha!  That was a fun class—Witches, Demons, and the Devil in the English Renaissance.  On the board behind us, it should say, “I know I’m not supposed to feel good about Satan,” a statement Janie Watkins made on the second night of class that thenceforth became our mantra and touchstone.  Why aren’t we supposed to feel good about Satan?  What if Satan just, um, makes us feel good?  How do we respond to those authoritative voices telling us that Satan isn’t good for us?  What’s their agenda?  What’s at stake?  What’s gained and lost, and by whom?  My students will recognize this kind of list of questions—I’m pretty adept at asking questions, and I attend with interest to a variety of potential answers, as people think through these things for themselves.  Listening to people, valuing them for who they are and what they’ve experienced, sharing stories and ideas and jokes and anxieties in our institutional cellula under flickering fluorescent lights as the night falls and the seasons shape-shift one into the next—it was a supreme act of love for me, not just a job or even a profession.  More than losing my marriage, my lifestyle, my self-image as a competent adult, losing this is shattering, the tumble that lands me on a lake of fire, broken, and angry.

february

Portrait of the Artist as a Mid-Life Crisis

by Icaria Able

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.  (peek...)

Let’s start there.  It’s not original, but neither is having a mid-life crisis.  I myself have spotted the balding man wearing a black leather jacket racing past me in the red sportscar and thought, “Ha.  Mid-life crisis.”  Or the man who leaves his wife of twenty years and starts dating a woman half his age?  When my husband did that, I called it for it was—mid-life crisis.  Clichés would not be clichés if they were not true, but still, we all think of ourselves as too special, unique, savvy, or ingenious to become a cliché ourselves.  It’s something other people—less conscious, educated, or interesting people—do.  Having a “mid-life crisis” is itself a cliché, and then part of that experience, for me, anyway, is noticing how much of one’s life has been a series of dipping into one cliché after another.  The life that we thought was independently led, creatively constructed, and dazzlingly original was, from the vantage point of mid-life, in fact awesomely orchestrated by forces much larger than ourselves, forces we probably thought we were bucking even as we fell into the pattern they prescribed for us.  For example, here’s how my personal goals accorded with mere geography: when I was twenty-one I moved to San Francisco to become a poet; when I was twenty-four I moved to New York City to become an opera singer; and when I was thirty-six I moved to Massachusetts to become an academic.  I re-located my entire life because a certain place had certain connotations, as though nobody writes poetry in Connecticut or sings opera in Tennessee.  I certainly turned my nose up at the idea of being an academic in Arkansas.  So what’s next?  Cowgirl in Texas?  Screenwriter in L.A.?  Stripper in New Orleans?  What’s next is exactly what I’ve been asking myself—seriously—a big question for people suffering a mid-life crisis, a question fraught with uncertainty and fear.  “I’m set free,” Lou Reed sings, “to find a new illusion.”  Or, rather, I’m set free-ee!  I’m set free-ee!  I’m set free to find a new illu-sha-uh-uh-uhn!  It feels better if you scream it.

The above quotation in the gigantic font comes at the end of James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—the final paragraph or so.  I’m telling you that because there’s some likelihood that you’re not an English major, as I am, and won’t necessarily recognize it.  English majors have the advantage of being able to connect whatever is going on in their personal experience to something they’ve read about, and while that may not sound like much of an advantage, it really is.  There will be more time later to discuss that further but at the moment I am not so much in the mood to glorify the intellectual lives of English majors—there are actually very few benefits that I can see lately, and I am not just an English major, but the consummate version of one, the mega-English major who spent over a decade in a university reading timeless works of literature and was finally rewarded a doctorate of philosophy—the impressive-sounding Ph.D.—at the end of it.  The cliché about education is that it is supposed to offer people more opportunity, and that is probably true for most educational paths, but there is really only one way to use a Ph.D. in English, and that is to become an English professor.  These are not easy jobs to come by, and if you do not get one, you’re fucked.  I cannot get one.  More about that later, I promise you.

Let’s continue on with clichés (this is fun!).  So, we mentioned the older man dating the younger woman—he’s in denial about his own aging, or he’s reliving his youth, or he simply finds younger women more attractive.  It’s been speculated that his ego is so damaged by the rigors of mid-life that he needs a woman for whom he is a cross between father and god—he knows everything, has done everything, and can give everything.  Fair enough.  I’m genuinely sorry I ever mocked this person, cliché or not.  Until recently in our culture, the older man-younger woman scenario was much more common than the other way around. Three years ago, my husband and I separated after nineteen years together; we’ve been divorced for less than a year.  He’s been dating a woman sixteen years younger than he is for about a year and a half. I, too, am seeing someone now—a handsome, burly, bearded man with silver eyes and a smile that careens through my body like a gust of wind.  “I think your totem animal is the bear,” I told him one morning, “What do you think my totem animal is?”  He’s thoughtful, and so he deliberated for a moment before saying, “You’re like a cat, but not a housecat.  More like a formidable, wild cat.  A mountain lion.  You know the other name for a mountain lion, don’t you?”  I nodded, smiling because I knew where he was going with this. My boyfriend is twenty-one, twenty years younger than I am. The word he was insinuating is cougar.

I don’t think I’ve ever written a paragraph with so many numbers in it! Does math have anything to do with the human heart?  I mean, sure, we know that the average, healthy human heart beats 42,075,904 times a year, give or take a million or two depending.  That’s kind of interesting, imagining how all those echoing thumps that we listen to as we lie awake at 4 o’clock in the morning add up.  Everything adds up over time—mistakes, lovers, jobs, friends—college degrees, maybe—grey hairs, wrinkles, fine lines.  Pets.  Kids.  Bills.  Vacations.  Achievements?  Failures.  You can add up anything and try to reckon what it amounts to.  I thought nineteen years was pretty impressive—I felt safe at year three when we moved across country to San Francisco together.  Likewise for year seven when we officially tied the knot surrounded by friends and family who all proclaimed our relationship an inspiration to them.  Even at year sixteen, when we bought our first house, but by year seventeen, I was beginning to wonder.  I had finally finished my dissertation and was intent on finding a job in a difficult economy.  He spent more and more time out with friends.  I thought we were both happy with that arrangement as a short-term reality, but we weren’t.  There was a moment—a second in time amongst all those days and weeks and years—when I realized we were not going to be together for the rest of our lives, and my heart beat against my breastbone so violently—a wild bird waking up in a cage—I felt as though I had to let it out somehow.  I opened up my mouth wide, but nothing came out.  That’s something that’s hard to measure—emptiness.  You can try to find the bottom of it but can’t note your progress in knots or cubic feet.  Maybe you can count it as tears shed or sleepless nights.  Deperate phone calls to friends.  Hangovers.  Rages.  How long does a mid-life crisis last?  Maybe when you find the bottom of your own emptiness you’ll know. 

If you’re an English major, chances are good—even if you specialize in Medieval Feminist Christian Literature or Mid-century American Authors-cum-Hollywood Dipsomaniacs—that you know the main character of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is named Stephen Dedalus, a part biographical, part fictional representation of Joyce himself. To me, that category of “part biography, part fiction” is so obvious, no matter the genré, that it really need not be stated at all.  Not only is fiction always part biography, or memoir always part fiction, but even life—the way we live it from bed to breakfast and all through the mundane day—is shot through with elements of both fiction and biography.  Even the least imaginative of us is just making shit up as he goes along, but that made-up shit might be the most important, meaningful portion of a person’s biography.  This is just my opinion.  It seems to me that there can be more truth in a book of fantasy—Jeannette Winterson’s The Passion, for example, or Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Shelley Jackson’s Half-Life, or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy—than in history books, which as time goes by often seem less and less accurate since they are so colored by time-specific assumptions.  Ditto for science, the endeavor that we in the early 21^st century credit with being most able to penetrate the secrets of life and nature and reveal the truest truths, the realest reality to our wondering eyes.  But not only are science and fiction not polar opposites, they are intimately implicated in one another; yes, there a literary genré called “science fiction,” but doesn’t all science necessarily begin as such?  What else is a theory—any one—the blank slate theory, the theory of relativity, or chaos theory—if not a fiction, something made up, imagined, that scientists set out to prove or disprove?  And even once a theory has been accepted by the scientific community and thenceforth by the rest of us dopes, time and circumstance will often provide insight that dismantles our truths in the least elegant ways.  Scientific “fact” once supported the superiority of the Aryan race and the irrelevance of greenhouse gasses in climate change.  Before Leonard Nimoy ever separated his third and fourth fingers and monotoned, “Live long and prosper,” Vulcan was thought to be a planet between Mercury and Mars.  Reality often begins in fiction and ends in either illusion or disillusion, each terrible in its own way, and so unstable are “facts” that it seems almost wiser to secure one’s truths in fantasy than in reality.  After all, a scientific fact (a word related to “manufacture,” reminding us that facts don’t just exist but are deliberately made) might last a year or an hour, and, meanwhile, look at how enduring the myths of the ancient Greeks have been.

This brings us back to Stephen Dedalus, a character whose fictiveness is implied by his mythological last name, evocative of the consummate Greek craftsman Daedalus, who built the Minotaur’s maze and escaped King Minos’ prison by fashioning giant wings for himself and his son and flying off over the sea.  But which portion of Joyce’s hero—his reality or his fiction—lies in the name Dedalus?  Joyce the author certainly went on to create literary labyrinths—Ulysses, Finnegan’s Wake—as confounding as the Minotaur’s maze, becoming a literary craftsman of masterful and inescapable influence.  This seems almost prophetic of Joyce, himself a young man, imagining how he would grow to inhabit the shape of the archetypal Craftsman.  In this writing of mine, Portrait of the Artist as a Mid-Life Crisis, my perspective makes me less sanguine, and although I am older than Joyce when he wrote his book, it is not Daedalus but his son, Icarus, the boy who flew dangerously close to the sun and tumbled into the sea, that seems my more appropriate mythological counterpart.  They say, “The child is the father of the man,” and my youthful Icarian tendencies have landed me in this present moment where I am helpless in a sea of doubt, waiting to discover if I can swim away or if I must sink indeed.  I made some mistake, as Icarus did—I did not heed the warnings of my elders maybe—I could not fly that middle path between salt wave and sunbeam, but allowed my flight to be guided by my own exuberance.  Lucifer did that, too, and also took a tumble for it.  I have some lofty precedents.  There are always precedents, which may be why it is difficult to impossible to be original and why it is so easy to spot clichés.  They are everywhere, and therefore they are easy to dismiss.  But, maybe, in them, as in myth and folk-stories and fairy-tales—the least factually true narratives around—lie the truest parts of our lives.  This is where we locate “the reality of experience” that Stephen Dedalus seeks at the end of Portrait, and we can read this reality in books and in the lives of people around us, but we cannot really know it as true until we experience it ourselves, until it is forged in the smithy of our own souls.  Young men and women set out on the adventure of life with the sure knowledge that they can make no mistake, but by mid-life, we see how we have blundered, faltered, faked it, misinterpreted, misunderstood, sailed up shit’s creek without a paddle, and generally fucked up.  The time left ahead of us in the labyrinth of life is no longer an heroic adventure but a trap.

I am trying to resist seeing every single decision I’ve made as a mistake simply because the sum of my choices has landed me here, in an unrenovated apartment smelling of antiquated cat pee that I can’t even afford, frighteningly underemployed, without health insurance or retirement savings.  I am—like many people—one major car repair away from overdraft.  I was always aware that many people live this way because I was raised by them and among them—the working poor, I believe they’re called now.  I was intent on going to college, and Pell Grants and state grants from Massachusetts and California paid for my undergrad degree, SallieMae fronted me the money for my Master’s, and the City University of New York remitted all tuition for my Ph.D.  I worked between twenty and forty hours a week for the duration of my long formal education, living ascetically and working hard.  My husband said he’d never known anyone who worked so hard; he himself wouldn’t claim to be a hard worker, but sometime during my grad studies, he began to make more money at his career, as well as become the beneficiary of annual financial gifts of his wealthy, aging parents.  We lived better—bought new clothes (and not just at thrift stores) and took vacations.  I looked forward to a life of happy productivity and comfortable easing into retirement.  It felt very secure—my effort at my career and in my marriage seemed bound to result in fruitful rewards.  Comfort. Ease. Wealth. Happiness.  For some reason, though, just a few years after this vision seemed so viable, it is now clear that my work on both of those fronts has ended in a yellow brick wall rather than a yellow brick road.  My marriage is over and my academic career is a wash.

For reasons I’ll discuss later, I work in a restaurant as a server.  It’s a nice restaurant, and I make decent money there, though I only work two nights a week, which isn’t enough.  I like it better than working in an office, and I make a better hourly than I would working in a shop.  The people I work with are amongst the best I’ve ever known, their humanity so singingly vibrant and effective in every way except for this stupid matter of making money in a professional career, a skill which none of us has been able to master, apparently.  For the past three years, as my Ph.D. becomes less and less meaningful, I’ve been busily dreaming up new careers for myself: grant-writer, librarian, GED teacher, furniture reupholsterer, English language tutor, lawyer.  None seem right.  Due to the kind of masculine interest my single status has stimulated, the job of trophy wife seems entirely possible, except that I like being alone and would only stand for being with someone else if I fell in love with him.  An old friend of mine recently had an interesting suggestion.  We share this duplex that her brother owns, and the laundry happens to be in my apartment, so when she came over to do laundry the other day, she said, “Have you thought of being a dominatrix?  There’s good money in that.”

“There is?”

“Sure.”  She meets different people and has different conversations than I do.  “You wouldn’t have to work that much.  A couple weekends in New York a month.”

“And I wouldn’t have to have sex with anyone, right?”

“Right.”

“And I wouldn’t even have to take my clothes off?”

“Right.”

“I kind of like dominatrix clothes.  They’re really comic book-y.”

“The clothes are a big part of it.  You’d just wear these cool clothes and strut around acting like a bitch, which you already do, anyway.”

“I do?”  I think of myself as a nice person, but maybe she meant “bitch” in that good way, the recuperated way that implies that I’m a confident and independent woman.  When I told my mom about the conversation, I was surprised at how unhesitatingly she agreed that I’d be good at it.  I think of myself as a humanitarian.  Another option I’ve been thinking about lately is joining the Peace Corps, and now I’m wondering about paddling people for money?  (As Roland Barthes said, “I am not self-contradictory; I am dispersed...”) With my English background, I could specialize in grammatical correction.  “How DARE you split an infinitive in MY presence!  What must I DO to you to make you re-SPECT the English language?”  Naughty school-teacher?  Is that the answer to my present dilemma of supporting myself, the avenue by which I’ll find the self I’m meant to be through the labyrinth of middle age?

Where is the escape?  How does a person ever find the way out of this maze of questions and potential realities?  A thread really is the best metaphor for our only hope of escaping the irrational, ax-wielding monster at the the heart of the labyrinth, isn’t it?  Right now, what connects me to the sunlight and the vivid world of life is as fragile and tender as a silken thread.  Maybe somebody is out there, outside the door of the maze, gently tugging at the other end, hoping I’ll ravel as surely as I unravelled.  Maybe this savior is a friend, a brother, a lover, a hero of some sort.  Maybe it’s some part of myself, the Daedalus I once believed I was, the Daedalus I might still become, who hasn’t abandoned me with a sad flap of invented wings to a fate of fighting for my life amongst the horrible depths, but has doubled back, hopes for me, believes in me still, and waits for me to find the delicate thread and follow it blindly through mind-fucking twists and turns, through the stabbing, wretched darkness, and out, back, liberated...

Welcome, O life!

One of the most dispiriting realizations of my mid-life crisis is that no one can save me except myself.  Just when I’ve come to fully understand how useless and ineffective I am.  Some people might turn to God, often referred to optimistically as a “savior,” but I’m afraid that depending on myself is the closest I can get to a religious feeling at this moment, religious because God—whatever he, she, or it is—did after all give me to myself, bountifully bestowed my life to me.  And so far I have been the villain of my own life story. If I had not been afraid my whole life—afraid of poverty, of mockery, of finding and being disappointed by my own limitations, I would be an artist.  Instead I am a failed academic, having made my bid for acceptable, socially-responsible citizen and been shot down.  Fear is not an appropriate motivation; it results in bad decisions and, simply put, bad people. Hence, I have been the villain of my own life so far, but now I must become the hero or lose something very precious, indeed—hope, the will to adventure, exuberance—a life beyond a series of biological functions.  I want to write a book about it, but this is not a self-help book except inasmuch as any book is one.  This is merely a fantasy that I, for some reason, must create, and you, generously, have decided to read about.  Please don’t expect anything original, ingenious, insightful, or brilliant.  I tend to experience my life through literary and historical lenses.  My title is obviously a take-off from Joyce’s novel, and even in this imitation I am not being original.  Dylan Thomas wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog and the band Dillinger Four wrote the song “Portrait of the Artist as a Fucking Asshole,” both totally awesome titles.  Still, in and amongst all these clichés and iterations there must lurk some “uncreated” portion of “the conscience of my race,” and that’s what I am intent on discovering.  Very reasonably, I fear that an average, work-a-day human being like myself will find only one unextraordinary truth after another within the wilderness of my own life, and maybe these unextraordinary truths will deliver me or maybe not.  If there’s something yet uncreated, however, that I need in order to become the person I yearn to be, then I must set about creating it, and all past failures can fuck off and fear of still more failure can fuck off extra hard.

Mid-life crisis?  Yes, obviously.  But I’m portraying myself as an artist because that’s what I need to be to save my own life.